Digital History seminar

2. • AHRC funded research project for online publication and
dissemination of the medieval English inquisitions post
mortem,
• Jan. 2011- Dec. 2014
• Department of History, University of Winchester, and
Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London
• Inquisitions post mortem (IPMs): nature, publication history
and historical value
• Online publication: our project
• Rationale
• Approach
• Findings

3. Inquisitions post mortem

4. The ‘feudal pyramid’

5. Inquisitions post mortem
• Sworn enquiries into the lands held at their deaths by direct
tenants of the crown (tenants-in-chief)
• Survive from about 1236 to 1660 (when feudal tenures were
abolished) in more-or-less continuous series at the National
Archives
• Usually created by escheator
• Designed to record and enforce royal feudal rights, especially
• Wardship, when a tenant died and their heir was not of full legal
age
• Primer seisin and relief, when an heir was of full age
• Related documents:
• Proofs of age
• Assignments of dower

6. Inquisitions post mortem
• Most contain information on:
• What lands and tenements the tenant held
• The nature of the tenant’s legal interest or estate
• Of whom the lands were held and by what feudal services
• What they were worth
• Sometimes a single valuation, sometimes a detailed itemization or
extent
• When the tenant died (systematically recorded only from 1342
onwards); the identity of their heir; and the heir’s age
• Names of the jurors who were present
• Many also describe
• Grants of land made by or to the tenant

11. Publication history
• Calendars (CIPMs), i.e. translation-cum-summary
• Four stages:
1. 1898 to 1955, covering period 1485 – 1509 (Henry VII)
2. 1904 to 1988, covering period 1236 – 1399 (Henry III – Richard II)
3. 1987 to 2002, covering period 1399 – 1422 (Henry IV and V)
4. 2003 to 2010, covering period 1422 – 1447 (Henry VI, part)
• 1447-85 and 1509 onwards still unpublished (except for some
local history society publications)
• Various omissions in stages 1-3 and changes of editorial policy
over 1-4

12. Extents and
valuations
Jurors Modernized
dates,
places
1236-1399 No No No
1399-1422 Yes No Yes
1422-1447 Yes Yes Yes
1485-1509 Valuations
but not
extents
No No

13. Historical value:
very varied

14. Historical value: core elements
• Descent of manors and property: county histories from 16th
cent. to Victoria County History;
• Landed society (aristocracy and gentry): estates; wealth;
marriages and marriage settlements; attitudes to inheritance
and family; changes and social mobility
• Economic and agrarian history: size and composition of
estates; relative importance of arable/meadow/rents etc./
regional variation and changes over time; landscape and
settlement history
• Demography: life-expectancy; seasonality of mortality; fertility
and replacement rates
• Government: changing nature and enforcement of royal
rights; interaction of central and local systems; manipulation
of the system; role of the jurors

15. Historical value:
reliability
• ‘extremely unreliable’
• ‘notoriously unreliable’
• ‘too unreliable to be of any value’
• Reasons for these judgements?

16. Historical value:
reliability
• ‘the single best source for reconstructing both the
institutional and economic geography of the country’
• ‘the single greatest available compendium of information
on the unit value of land’
• ‘no other contemporary source is as informative’ [on
common rights]
• ‘the single most useful source for analysing the scale,
nature, and value of seigneorial milling’
• Reasons for these judgements?

17. Historical value: reliability
• Impossible to take a black-and-white approach
• Mapping and statistical analysis can reveal a great deal about
the limitations and idiosyncrasies of the IPMs
• Barns in Hampshire
• Customary acres
• Mapping and statistical analysis at a large enough scale may
also be able to compensate for some of these limitations and
idiosyncrasies

19. Mapping the Medieval
Countryside
• Grew out of the most recent bout of publication, 2003-10
• Original objective to continue calendaring 1447 onwards
• Calendaring in print form unsatisfactory:
• Audience: academic or wider local/family history, genealogy?
• Access
• Expense of the more recent volumes
• Scarcity of the older volumes
• Need for a full series to answer many research questions
• Analysis
• Rich information but often very laborious to extract from printed
calendars
• Limitations of the indexes: persons, places, and subjects

21. • An initial solution: digitization
• Not the original documents: condition, size etc.
• Volumes 1-20 (1236-1399) and 2nd series 1-3 (1485-1509)
• Rekeyed and mounted on the project website and British History
Online essentially as plain text
• Volumes 1-2 available
• Limited functionality, not always easy to search for persons /
places due to variant spellings
• A long-term solution: full electronic calendaring
• Volumes 18-26 (1399-1447), i.e. those containing valuations and
extents
• Fully indexed using TEI XML markup
• Rich functionality
• A model: England on the Eve of the Black Death

22. • Database of manorial
extents 1300-49
• Statistical analysis
• GIS mapping
• Pioneered large-scale
analysis of IPMs as
key evidence for
economic and
agrarian change

23. New light on the precision
and reliability of IPMs

24. New light on the value of seigniorial resources

25. New light on the
distribution of landscape
features and seigneurial
resources

26. New light on the
absolute value
of land items

27. New light on the
relative value
of land items

28. Our project…
• By 1399 the material is not as rich (decline of demesne
farming), but a similar approach is feasible
• c. 7000 documents, c.15000 holdings, c. 2500 manorial
extents 1399-1447
• Capture agrarian information from all IPMs, not just manorial
extents
• Capture other information as well
• Tenants’ estates in land
• Grants and enfeoffments: spread of entail and use
• Tenures and services
• Dates of death and heirs
• Administrative information (dates, types of writ, jurors –
enhancement of volumes 18-21 for 1399-1422)

29. • Agrarian changes (e.g. the shift from arable to pasture)
• Demography, inheritance, succession
• The ‘feudal system’
• Local and central government

30. Findings…?
• Data entry, analysis, and development of interface ongoing
• What follows is subject to revision – intended to illustrate the
possibilities of the resource

31. Estates in land
Estates in land,
1432-7 (by
number of
holdings, all
holdings)
Estates in land,
1432-7
(manors only)

32. Agrarian history
Frequency
distribution:
value of meadow
per acre, d., 1427-32
n=148
mean=14.4

33. Frequency distribution:
acreages of meadow,
1427-32
Mean: 16

34. Frequency
distribution:
value of manor courts,
1427-32, in pence
n=52
mean=113.7 (0.47£)

35. Demography
Mortality of tenants in chief, numbers/year, 1418-1446

36. Demography
• Possible explanations:
• Actual variations in mortality for various reasons (disease,
famine, war, etc.)
• Variations in the efficiency of the IPM process (possible that more
tenants-in-chief were identified at some times due e.g. to ‘fiscal
feudalism’)
• Outbreaks of plague/disease known from chronicles etc. 1420,
1427, 1433-4, 1438-9

37. Deaths/month, 1420

38. ‘Shown to the jurors’: evidence
for literacy?
References to documents “shown/presented (etc.) to the
jurors”, CIPM vols. 1-21 and 2nd ser. 1-3, by volume

39. • Possible explanations:
• Changing practice at inquisitions (more documents were being
shown to jurors, which may imply more jurors being able to read
/ understand them)
• Changing documentary conventions (documents had been shown
to jurors before, but this practice was not commonly noted in the
IPMs before 1400 or after 1485. Such a change might still have
implications for jurors’ literacy)
• Changing calendaring practices (the IPMs do in fact refer to
documents being shown to the jurors, but the editors of some
calendars did not consider this important enough to include)

40. @MedievalIPM
www.inquisitionspostmortem.ac.uk